I’ve just posted a new video on behalf of the Public Index, What Next for Google Books?. It’s an 80-minute discussion between myself and noted digital copyright experts and longtime settlement followers Jonathan Band and Kenneth Crews. We discuss Google’s scanning project, the lawsuit against it by copyright owners, the proposed settlement and the controversy around it, Judge Chin’s opinion rejecting the settlement, possible next steps for the parties, and some of the larger issues raised by the case. It’s a self-contained overview of how the settlement got to where it is now and what might happen next, designed to be informative no matter how little or how much you already know about the case.
I recently read a New Scientist interview with one of Googles mega brains ( name escapes me ). He was talking about the possibilities that combining massive, giga giga mountains of language data ( presumably scans of every text in the world) with simple algorithms offered for the making of really effective translation services possible .
Could it be possible that the ‘books’ were a smoke screen obscuring a use that was not really that much to do with copyright, but was a commercially secret purpose?